After assuming the top job in October 2011, she named a new publisher at USA Today and launched a brand redesign of the flagship newspaper to celebrate its 30th anniversary. She also unveiled a new digital strategy aimed at taking advantage of Gannett's deep relationships with consumers and advertisers in local markets across the country, through its network of 81 daily community newspapers and 23 television stations, including network affiliates in Denver, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. And she instituted a paid-subscription plan for online customers while limiting free online access to nonsubscribers.

Martore was forced to make hard choices at Gannett to keep the company healthy. Now she's focused on digital strategy.
Chad Dowling for Barron's

Martore, 61, who served previously as Gannett's president and chief operating officer, and earlier, as chief financial officer, courted Wall Street, too. She held the company's first-ever investor day, at which she laid out a plan to return capital to shareholders. At her urging, the board boosted the annual dividend by 150%, to 80 cents a share, for a current yield of 4.5%, instantly adding to Gannett's appeal among income-seeking investors. Not quite finished, she announced a plan to buy back $300 million of shares in a two-year span, with a goal of returning $1.3 billion to shareholders by 2015.

AS A RESULT OF THESE and other initiatives, the outlook for Gannett has brightened in a dour market for newspaper publishers. The company is on track to earn $559 million, or $2.32 a share, this year, up from $518 million, or $2.13 a share, in 2011, with gains helped by cost cuts in the publishing division, strong growth in paid subscriptions, and record political and Olympic advertising in the broadcast business. The broadcasting division is expected to contribute 16% of this year's $5.3 billion in revenue and 50% of operating profit.

As for Gannett's shares (ticker: GCI), they're up more than 80%, to $18, since Martore began calling the shots.

Then again, achievement is nothing new for Martore, the dynamic, Wellesley College-educated daughter of parents who were the first in their families to graduate from high school. Both were determined that their three children would go to college, a dream Martore's mother kept alive by working two jobs, as a courthouse clerk by day and a seamstress by night.

"My parents taught me some great values about hard work and personal responsibility and doing whatever it takes to get the job done," says Martore, who was reared in the Boston suburb of Belmont, Mass., in a house built by her father, who died when she was in her teens.

The Vietnam War and the social revolution of the late 1960s and early '70s coincided with Martore's college years, and sparked many classroom and dorm-room debates. Like others in that contentious era, she discovered the power in making her voice heard. "Wellesley was focused on educating women to make a difference, whether in social services or business or at home," Martore said recently, in a wide-ranging interview at Gannett's glass-and-aluminum-sheathed headquarters in McLean, Va. "Wellesley had a huge impact on my confidence, and on my ability to deal with any situation, to learn how to think through problems, and to understand things. It was a great experience for me."

ONE TEACHER, IN PARTICULAR, had a profound influence: her senior advisor and political-science professor, Marion Just, who still teaches at Wellesley and is also a research associate and advisory-board member at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the author of numerous books on the media. "She was an incredibly accomplished person—very smart," Martore recalls. "She also had a family and was a great role model back then, in her ability to balance all of those things and be very good at all of them at the same time."

Martore, herself a mother of two, recalls that Just was "an incredibly hard grader," and laughs at the memory with a gusty guffaw.

"I reached for my old grade books and there she was," says Just of the student then known as Gracia Mangano. Admitting that grading was a "tough scene" in the early 1970s, Just says she gave Martore a B+ in Political Parties and Interest Groups, and a B+/A- in Quantitative Research in her senior year. In notations made in the margins of her grade books, where she would privately assign pluses and double-pluses for effort and other positive attributes that weren't included in the official grade, Just found this: "In all the possible ways of getting pluses, Gracia was always there."

The message to women at that time, says Just, was that they "had to work harder than men to achieve the same goals. What stood out was how highly motivated she was."

In addition to her studies, Martore held three jobs during her Wellesley years—at the school's library, the Boston Public Library, and her uncle's seafood restaurant, where she was a cashier. That left little time for extracurricular activities, although there was always time to root for the Red Sox.

AFTER GRADUATING WITH degrees in history and political science, Martore was offered a job at a Boston-area bank, which afforded an introduction to business and valuable lessons in leadership. "I was a lender, and I loved being able to help companies to grow," she says. "You're not lending just to a company; you are lending to people, and understanding what drives them. When I lent money, I could see differences in what leadership means. You could have the same set of circumstances and the same opportunity set and the same financing, and you could see that great leaders get great results, and mediocre leaders, even with the same great opportunities, tend not to get great results."

That's not all Martore learned. One day, early on, she was summoned to see the senior credit officer of the bank, whom she recollects as an imposing, white-haired figure sitting behind a huge desk with a copy of The Wall Street Journal on it. His message: "I'm going to give you some advice, and I want this to stay with you for the rest of your life. Never do anything that you wouldn't want your mother to read about on the front page of The Wall Street Journal."

She hasn't forgotten it yet. "It ties in perfectly with what my parents taught me about taking responsibility and making sure that whatever the situation is, do the right thing, because what really matters at the end of the day is your reputation and your credibility," she says.

Martore stayed in banking for 12 years, eventually landing at Maryland National in Washington, where she moved in 1979 with her husband, Joseph Martore. He is president and CEO of Calibre, an employee-owned management and technology-services company that does contract work for government agencies. She passed on numerous job opportunities that arose in these years, until Gannett came knocking in 1985. The media company, which also publishes community newspapers including the Des Moines Register, the Detroit Free Press, and the Nashville Tennessean, was relocating to the D.C. area from Rochester, N.Y., and was looking for an assistant treasurer.

After spending so much time helping companies obtain financing, Martore found herself itching to make a more direct contribution to a company's success. Gannett proved "a turn-on" to the self-professed news junkie, who also was taken with the company's culture of meritocracy and diversity. "Banking in those days was not, shall we say, a bastion of opportunities for women," Martore says.

USA Today, whose color-coded sections, brief stories, and infographics were then a new concept in the newspaper industry, had been launched three years before, and Martore found Gannett's emphasis on innovation appealing. Important to the green eyeshade in her, she also determined the company was financially sound and had a good future.

"I had lots of opportunities to go with companies where I could be responsible for two foreign currencies, and if I did a really, really good job, I could be responsible for four foreign currencies," she says. "That didn't appeal to me. I like to have a lot going on—lots of challenges."

Challenge is what the newspaper industry now offers in spades, as increasing numbers of readers migrate to the Internet. Gannett, like other publishers, has grappled with the fallout, which was compounded by the great recession of 2008. The company has had two major rounds of layoffs in its newspaper division since August 2008, and has ordered one-week unpaid furloughs for many employees since 2009, at which point senior executives also took a reduction in pay equal to one-week's salary. The company now has 31,000 employees, down from 52,000 in 2006.

Sensitive to the sacrifices her employees were forced to make, Martore asked her board, shortly after becoming CEO, to refrain from boosting her annual base salary of $950,000. Earlier this year, she also requested that the board reduce the $1.5 million bonus it had recommended for her; she received $1.2 million instead.

Make no mistake, though, Martore is handsomely paid via her salary, bonus, stock options, and deferred compensation. That hasn't been lost on those in the newsroom, and those who monitor newsrooms and corporate suites. She and other executives, past and present, routinely come under the scrutiny of former USA Today reporter and editor Jim Hopkins, a self-appointed watchdog, who took a buyout in 2008 and maintains a newsy independent blog tracking the goings-on at the company. He praises the CEO for setting the right tone from the outset, eliminating reserved parking spaces for senior officers, ridding Gannett's headquarters of a controversial sculpture that had rankled staffers, and holding back her pay.

"People decisions are the most difficult decisions to make," Martore says. "When people had great careers with the company and did what they needed to do, and then there was a period like 2008-2009, I had to think about the number of people we needed to move forward with, and make sure we had the strongest possible company for those who remained here. Like everyone, we had to downsize. We needed to have the financial wherewithal and the ability to continue to invest."

FOR NOW, GANNETT HAS THAT, and more. The company generates more than $600 million a year in free cash flow, and in the past four years has repaid more than $2 billion of debt. It also has invested in some fast-growing Internet businesses, including CareerBuilder, a job-search Website in which it has a controlling stake. In its broadcast business, meanwhile, retransmission-fee revenue is expected to rise by more than 40% in 2013. These fees, which local network-affiliated broadcasters charge cable and satellite customers for access to their signals, are renegotiated every three years.

Martore has a full plate at Gannett, just as she hoped for, and that isn't likely to change. She's making a difference, as she was educated to do, and still getting double-pluses—but this time from Wall Street, not Wellesley.